Repair your slots

By Egay Uy

I HAD to refuel my ride the other day and I found it convenient to do so in Carmen, specifically at Vamenta Blvd. corner Max Suniel. I took out a P1- thousand bill and asked the gas station attendant for P1 thousand worth of fuel.

To my dismay, I could not see the numbers on the dispensing pump numeric slots because apparently the bulbs or LCD used got busted. I noticed the unreadable numbers halfway through the refueling process.

I asked the attendant if he could read the numbers. He replied in the affirmative even as I saw nothing. He assured me that the amount of fuel he put into my gas tank was worth a thousand pesos.

I demanded that the digital display be repaired otherwise motorists could be shortchanged through several possible ways. For one, the pump may already have a reading which means somebody else may have purchased some amount of fuel before I did, resulting in my paying for fuel that was not delivered to me. And it could happen to anybody else.

May this reach the gas station management at Vamenta-Suniel Streets in Barangay Carmen.

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It cannot even be considered a revelation when an official of the Land Transportation Franchising and Regulatory Board admitted before the city council that indeed there are quite a good number of unauthorized (read: “colorum”) taxi units plying the city streets.

Without even counting, as I have earlier written, we can find that city is literally flooded with taxi units. It is not hard to get a taxi ride in the city probably because of the proliferation of unauthorized units.

What boggles me is that there was a publicized crackdown against unauthorized units. How in the world can we expect city streets to be cleared of unauthorized taxi units if operations like that are announced beforehand if the intention is to apprehend and impound unauthorized units?

Naturally, those operating unauthorized units will simply avoid running their units during the crackdown days. I can’t help it but wonder if the crackdown was sincere or merely for show.

Unauthorized units should be strictly disallowed because they do not provide enough protection to passengers – no insurance, no authority to operate, no registration. They deprive the government of revenue because they do not pay franchise fees and taxes. They deprive the legitimate operators of commuters and a dent in their legitimate share of the business.

If the LTFRB, the LTO, and the RTA want to rid city streets of “colorums” (taxi, habal-habal, bao-bao, etc.), then there ought to be a relentless program to apprehend the owners and drivers of these unauthorized operations and operations should be consistent.

Easier said than done, but it can be done. (Egay Uy is a lawyer. He chairs the City’s Regulatory and Complaint Board, co-chairs with the city mayor the City Price Coordinating Council, and chairs the city’s Joint Inspection Team.  He retired as a vice president of Cepalco.)